Romantic Terrorism

An Auto-Ethnography of Domestic Violence, Victimization and Survival

S. Hayes, S. Jeffries

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137468499
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Romantic Terrorism offers an innovative methodology in exploring the ways in which domestic violence offenders terrorise their victims. Its focus on the insidious use of tactics of coercive control by abusers opens up much-needed discussion on the damage caused to victims by emotional and psychological abuse.

1

Romantic Terrorism

Abstract: The argument put forward in this book is that terrorists operate in Australia every day. Innocent women are tortured, held captive and/or killed every week in this country and worldwide by people who rely on fear and intimidation to control them. But because these terrorists torture the women they profess to love, their intimate partners (or ex-partners), their behaviour is hidden from public sight; it is hardly ever discussed and rarely evokes outrage and has never resulted in governments or anyone else declaring a “war” against it. This chapter explores the concept of coercive control as proposed by Stark (2007), Murphy (2014) and others and makes a convincing argument for characterizing coercive control as a form of terrorism.

Keywords: coercive control; domestic violence; intimate partner homicide; psychological violence; romantic terrorism

Hayes, Sharon and Samantha Jeffries. Romantic Terrorism: An Auto-Ethnography of Domestic Violence, Victimization and Survival. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137468499.0004.

Introduction

The argument put forward in this book is that terrorists operate in Australia every day. Innocent women are tortured, held captive and/or killed every week in this country and worldwide by people who rely on fear and intimidation to control them. But because these terrorists torture the women they profess to love, their intimate partners (or ex-partners), their behaviour is hidden from public sight; it is hardly ever discussed and rarely evokes outrage and has never resulted in governments or anyone else declaring a “war” against it.

Shortly after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001, the Australian government declared a “war on terror”. New laws were quickly enacted to combat the terrorist threat posed by Islamic extremists. These new laws were stunning in scope, number and reach, conferring broad powers on government agencies and impacting on the liberty of those involved or suspected to be involved in terrorism (Williams, 2011: 1137). In spite of the fact that the risk and numbers of victims far outweigh the threat of political terrorism, governments have never so vehemently responded to acts of terror perpetuated against women at the hands of their romantic partners or ex-partners. Indeed, compared to the “threat” posed by political and religious extremists and the damage caused by their terrorist activity, intimate partner terrorism is perceived as less serious and hardly a threat at all to the social fabric of modern society. Yet, is violence against women in the domestic sphere and the supposed sanctity of romantic relationships really that different from populist understandings of terrorist acts and torture in our post-9/11 world? In this book we explore the extant research literature and personal auto-ethnographic narratives to demonstrate the parallels between political terrorism and the terrorism, torture and abuses perpetrated within romantic relationships.

Australian Federal Law defines a terrorist act as “an action or threat of action” which is done or made with the intention of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause and coercing, or influencing, by intimidation the government of the Commonwealth, State, Territory or the government of a foreign country, or intimidating the public or a section of the public. An action will be defined as a terrorist act only if it causes serious physical harm or death; seriously damages property; endangers a person’s life; creates a serious risk to public health or safety (Commonwealth of Australia, Criminal Code 100.1(1)). Torture is defined by the United Nations (1984) as, “an act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person, for a purpose such as obtaining information or a confession, punishment, intimidation, or coercion, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind”.

We conceptualize intimate partner violence as coercive control, a term introduced by Stark in 2007, which has been recently gaining ground in both the scholarly literature and public narratives (e.g. Williamson, 2010; Fisher, 2011; Government of Western Australia, 2012; Evans, 2014; Murphy, 2014). Stark’s model emphasizes purpose (perpetrator intent) and process (perpetrator tactics) as well as victim outcomes. Coercive control is a pattern of intentional tactics employed by perpetrators with the intent of governing a woman’s thoughts, beliefs or conduct and/or to punish them for resisting their regulation. Perpetrator tactics may include actual physical and/or sexual violence. However, actual violence inflicted upon victim bodies is conceptualized as a tactic of control. This understanding is demonstrated in the following quote from the Australian National Council to Reduce Violence against Women and Their Children (2009: 13).

A central element of domestic violence is that of an ongoing pattern of behaviour aimed at controlling one’s partner through fear (for example, by using violent or threatening behaviour) ... the violent behaviour is part of a range of tactics used by the perpetrator to exercise power and control.

Coercive control can be distinguished from a bad relationship (in which both partners are abusive toward each other) by identifying a perpetrator’s intent to control and the consequent negative outcomes for his or her victim. The victim’s experience of coercive control can be likened to being taken hostage; the victim becomes captive in a dreamlike world created by the perpetrator, in which she is entrapped by confusion, contradiction and fear. Coercive control takes away victims’ freedom and strips away their sense of self. Much like a hostage held by a terrorist, a woman’s bodily integrity maybe violated, but more profoundly she is stripped of her basic human right to the freedom of thought and action, often literally, but always metaphorically. Such behaviour, we argue, highlights the insidious, terroristic and torturous nature of intimate partner violence (Stark, 2007).

What will become clear as this book unfolds is that the purpose and process of political terrorism and torture is strikingly similar to intimate partner violence. Perpetrators of intimate partner violence intentionally threaten, coerce and intimidate their partners, who are mostly women, by using discriminatory frameworks based on gender, homophobia and heterosexism (in the case of same-sex intimate partner violence) to advance their own ideological causes. Akin with torture, the aim of this violence is often to obtain information, confessions and to punish. Qualitatively, the consequences of intimate partner violence and associated acts of torture are comparable to terrorism; both result in physical, emotional, social and economic pain, suffering and harm to individual victims. Quantitatively, the consequences of intimate partner violence, we argue, are even more acute for victims and society than political and religious terrorism (Copelon, 1994: 298–299).

However, societal responses to the atrociousness of intimate partner violence are startlingly incongruent with responses to cases of terrorism and torture. No war, for example, has been declared against intimate partner violence and little sympathy is extended to women who are held hostage (whether figuratively or factually) by violent intimates. The comparative lack of responsiveness to the terrorization and torture of women within romantic or formerly romantic relationships speaks to social and political disbelief, minimization, apathy and, at times, belligerence. The lack of support for victims compounds their trauma and fear in ways never experienced by those subjected to terrorism or torture of the political kind, as it is currently understood; it is gender discrimination and a breach of women’s basic human rights (Bunch, 1990; Thomas and Beasley, 1993; Amnesty International, 2009).

Our journey begins at the end by juxtaposing the individual, social and societal consequences of terrorism/torture and intimate partner violence. This is followed by a comparative consideration of the purpose and processes of terrorism/torture and intimate partner violence. It is hoped this provides the context for a more detailed inquiry into the strategies and tactics employed in romantic terrorism.

Juxtaposing terrorism and intimate partner violence

Since 1978, 113 Australians have been killed as a result of terrorist activity (including as hostages). Counting those who lost their lives in the World Trade Centre, 14 people died between 2001 and 2014. In comparison, around 62 women are killed by intimate partners or ex-partners in Australia every year (The Woman’s Centre, 2014: 4; Chan and Payne, 2013: 18). Expropriating from this, 2,232 women lost their lives from 1978 to 2014 and over 800 women have died since 2001. Worldwide, in 2012 alone, 43,600 women died as a result of intimate partner/family-related violence, compared to a total of 11,098 terrorist casualties (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2013: 14). This means that since 2001, the number of women killed in Australia as a result of intimate partner homicide is 58 times greater than the number of Australian citizens who have died in terrorist attacks. Worldwide, the number of women killed by romantic (ex-)partners is four times greater than the number of terrorist fatalities.

In the United States, the National Coalition against Domestic Violence (NCDAW) (2014) reports that “one in every four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime”. They estimate that, every year, 1.3 million women are physically assaulted by their partner or ex-partner, with the most targeted women aged between 20 and 24. Sadly, most women don’t report abuse to the police (NCADW, 2014). Of those victims who are killed, 70–80% are abused before they are murdered. Indeed, “almost one-third of female homicide victims [in the United States] that are reported in police records are killed by an intimate partner” (NCADW, 2014).

Similarly, in the United Kingdom, Women’s Aid reports that an incident of domestic violence is reported to police every two minutes, while “on average, two women a week are killed by a current or former male partner” (Women’s Aid, 2014). While it has been reported that one in six men are also victims of domestic violence, Women’s Aid cautions that this statistic is based on single incident reports and therefore fails to take into account the often complex nature of violence against women. Women by far form the majority of victims of sexual assault in intimate relationships, and they are more likely to be subjected to emotional abuse – a type of abuse often not regarded as domestic violence (Women’s Aid, 2014). As we argue, emotional abuse is often far more destructive than physical injury; it is much more debilitating and takes longer to recover from.

The vast majority of intimate partner homicide is perpetrated by men against women in heterosexual relationships. However, both female and male same-sex intimate relationships are not immune. It has been reported that women in same-sex relationships are also killed, albeit far less frequently than heterosexual women, by their abusive partners (Gannoni and Cussen, 2014; National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, 2013). Although the plight of victims in male same-sex relationships is acknowledged, it is excluded from our arguments in this book because there is not enough research to evaluate the prevalence or impact of romantic terrorism on that demographic. In addition, our exploration of romantic terrorism draws on a feminist theoretical perspective that takes the social construction of romance and sex, and the induction of girls and women into romantic idealism, as its starting point (Hayes, 2014). It is for these reasons that the current work focuses only on women¹ as victims. However, we do consider both male and female perpetrators.

The female death toll from intimate partner violence does not end with the homicide data. In Australia, those tasked with investigating domestic-violence-related deaths report a significant correlation between intimate partner violence and women committing suicide (Beattie, 2014). A clear association between domestic violence and suicide has also been established by researchers in the United States and throughout the Asia Pacific Region (UNICEF, 2000: 4; Radford, 2008: 40–41). UNICEF (2000: 4) reports that suicide is 12 times more likely to have been attempted by a woman who has been abused than one who has not. Women may be driven to suicide through emotional torture, living in terror and subsequent feelings of entrapment instigated by perpetrators through a terrifying web of abusive and controlling tactics. Tragically, for these women, who are denied their basic human rights to freedom and protection from harm, the only plausible avenue for escape from their virtual prisons is to take their own lives (Radford, 2008: 40–41).

Though alarmingly high numbers of women die as a result of intimate partner violence, even more women experience immediate and on-going harm to their physical and psychological well-being. While physical injuries are the most obvious evidence of domestic violence, psychological and emotional abuse often has far-reaching effects on the long-term physical outcomes and impacts on women’s emotional well-being.

In the United States, physical abuse in intimate relationships is identified as being the most common cause of injury to women, comprising 21% of all traumatic injuries (Guth and Pachter, 2000: 438). This is hardly surprising given the significantly large numbers of women, both heterosexual and non-heterosexual, who are subjected to physical abuse by intimate partners. For example, in the United States, a recent prevalence study reports that 659,000 lesbian women and 35,291,000 heterosexual women will experience physical violence at the hands of a current or former romantic partner at some point in their lifetime (Waters, Chen and Breiding, 2013: 18). Typical injuries “vary in severity and range from bruises, cuts and black eyes, to miscarriages, bone injuries, splenic and liver trauma, partial loss of hearing or vision, and scars from burn or knife wounds” (Guth and Pachter, 2000: 438).

Research suggests that prevalence of physical harms caused to women as a result of intimate partner violence is quantitatively similar for women in both heterosexual and same-sex relationships (Waters, Chen and Breiding, 2013: 30). Waters, Chen and Breiding (2013: 30) report that across their lifetime around 8% heterosexual women in the United States are injured by a physically violent intimate partner, and there are no statistical differences in the likelihood of harm that heterosexual and non-heterosexual women are exposed to. While actual numbers were not reported for non-heterosexual women, the lifetime prevalence of physical injury to heterosexual women was reported to be n = 15,967,000 (Waters, Chen and Breiding, 2013: 30). In contrast, over a period of 40 years (1969–2009), 16,300 people suffered injuries because of international terrorism directed at the United States (Muhlhausen and Baker, 2011: 1).

The physical injuries inflicted upon women’s bodies by violent intimates are visible. Less obvious are the emotional and psychological bruises that result from living day in and day out under the oppressive darkness of coercive control. Universally, women who have been victimized by intimate partner violence say it is the psychological abuse that causes them the most pain and trauma both in the short and long term (Stark, 2007). In reality many perpetrators never use physical violence. Some may use what is best described as minor assaultive violence such as pushing, grabbing and/or getting “up in a victim’s face”. Others may threaten physical violence. Some may follow through on these threats, but only when they are losing control over the victim. The two largest predictors of intimate partner homicide, for example, are, in fact, emotionally abusive and controlling behaviours and victim-instigated relationship separation (Stark, 2007: 276–277). In Australian cases of murder-suicide, for example, few offenders are reported to have invoked physical violence prior to the killings. There are, however, extensive histories of psychological violence and control (Beattie, 2014). As noted earlier, and is discussed in more detail in the following pages, physical violence is not a definitive feature of intimate partner violence; rather, it is but one tactic of coercive control wielded by perpetrators to keep women submissive and fearful.

Coercive psychological and emotional control has deleterious consequences to women’s well-being in and of itself (O’Leary and Maiuro, 2001: xi–xii). Independent of physical violence, psychological abuse has, for example, been linked to increased physical health problems such as arthritis, chronic pain, migraines and stomach ulcers (O’Leary and Maiuro, 2001: xii). It also has negative impacts on women’s mental health including high levels of fear, anxiety, depression, substance misuse and attempted and actual suicide (Radford, 2008: 38–43; Stark, 2007: 120–123). A number of authors have also noted characteristics of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Stockholm Syndrome in victims of intimate partner violence. PTSD is a serious anxiety disorder triggered by a traumatic event outside the range of usual human experience. It is characterized by (1) re-experiencing the trauma in flashbacks or dreams; (2) psychological numbing indicated by a disinterest in significant activities, feelings of detachment and estrangement from others; and (3) hyper-vigilance, manifesting in exaggerated startle response, insomnia, difficulty concentrating, memory loss, feelings of guilt and avoidance of activities that call the traumatic event to mind (LaViolette and Barnett, 2000: 120). PTSD was originally diagnosed in soldiers returning home from war, but has subsequently been found to afflict hostages, direct and indirect victims of terrorist acts and victims of intimate partner violence (Greig, 2006; Johnson, 2008: 42; Cantor and Price, 2007; LaViolette and Barnett, 2000: 122–126; Jones, 2000: 88; Whalley and Brewin, 2007; Başoğlu, Livanou and Crnobaric, 2007).

As is the case with intimate partner violence, physical attacks are not a necessary prerequisites for the development of PTSD symptoms amongst hostages or victims of terrorism. Terrorism is “psychological warfare”; the threat of terrorism alone can cause anxiety, stress and PTSD symptoms (Greig, 2006: 59). Similarly, recent research undertaken by Başoğlu et al. (2007) found that the mental suffering and long-term psychological outcomes for hostages who were mentally ill-treated during captivity was as severe as that caused by physical torture. A study of 279 survivors of torture from the former Yugoslavia found that those who experienced only psycholo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Romantic Terrorism
• 2  Tools and Tactics
• 3  Profile of a Victim
• 4  Recovering from Romantic Terrorism
• Appendix
• References
• Index